ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has rejected calls in Britain for the deportation of Shabir Ahmed, the freed ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, the foreign office in Islamabad said on Thursday, adding the case is “entirely an internal matter of the United Kingdom” and that the Pakistani government has “no connection whatsoever” with it.
Ahmed, 73, who came to the UK in the late 1960s, was jailed for 22 years in 2012 after being convicted of sexually exploiting girls as young as 13 in the northern English town of Rochdale. Stripped of his British citizenship after his conviction, he was released on license this month to supervised accommodation and fitted with an electronic tag, and cannot be deported under a 1971 law protecting Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the UK before 1973. Ahmed says he has renounced his Pakistani citizenship.
The UK Home Office has acknowledged that Ahmed’s deportation depends on Pakistan accepting him.
“I strongly condemn the incident of child sexual abuse in the strongest possible terms… Perpetrators of such heinous crimes must be investigated, prosecuted, and punished to the fullest extent of the law, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or religion,” Pakistani foreign office spokesman Tahir Andrabi said at a weekly press briefing.
“The individual concerned is a British national who spent his entire adult life in the UK and was duly convicted by a British court for reprehensible offenses committed on British soil,” he said, adding that decisions on his release and legal status “fall exclusively within the jurisdiction of the competent British authorities.”
Andrabi said regardless of where Ahmed was born, the onus lied on “where he grew up, was raised, groomed, and unfortunately spoilt,”
“His heinous crimes demand serious introspection rather than a quest to search for extraneous causes,” he added.
UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced plans this week to amend the 1971 Act so that its protections no longer apply to serious criminals, saying the law “should not be used as a bar against removal in cases like that of Shabir Ahmed.”
The amendment, to be tabled under an immigration bill currently before Parliament, could take up to a year to pass, according to British media, with opposition politicians urging emergency legislation and suggesting visa restrictions on Pakistan if it does not accept Ahmed.
Some of Ahmed’s victims have said they felt unsafe following his release, according to the BBC.
The British government has said he will be returned to prison if he breaches his license conditions.
